Gov. Gavin Newsom said he will not lift his shelter-in-place order until adequate suppression and mitigation measures are in place to prevent future flare-ups. That means tracking down the sick and isolating clusters of new infections, arming hospitals with adequate equipment and setting new guidelines for schools and businesses to reopen.

State officials want to build reserves of doctors, nurses, paramedics, pharmacists and other frontline providers to help staff some of the 66,000 additional beds that might be needed for the anticipated mid-May surge. On numbers alone the health corps already shows promise, far exceeding the state’s expectation.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has assembled an unusual alliance of corporations and nonprofits and leveraged California’s massive buying power to reach a deal that will bring hundreds of millions of masks and other protective equipment to hospital workers battling the coronavirus.

Health care and life sciences account for around 150,000 jobs in the Sacramento region, making the sector the largest private employer. Experts suggest that the public sector and health care may expand locally, even as the coronavirus pandemic contracts the global economy.

As the number of people hospitalized in California with the coronavirus doubled in just four days, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday sent out an urgent call seeking help from the state’s 37,000 retired and part-time health care professionals. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom expressed confidence Saturday that California has the capacity to produce enough ventilators to meet its projected needs in response to the coronavirus pandemic. But he cautioned that the state’s need could expand if the crisis worsens.  

Face masks have flown off the shelves around the United States amid the coronavirus outbreak, even though experts have advised people against wearing them unless they are sick. That has triggered a shortage for farmworkers, who wear masks to avoid inhaling pesticides or field dust.

As California braced for an onslaught of desperately ill coronavirus patients, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced plans over the weekend to open two new hospitals, and President Donald Trump said the federal government will ship a number of mobile hospital units to the state, pay for National Guard deployments and deploy the San Diego-based naval hospital ship Mercy to Los Angeles.

According to a letter Gov. Newsom sent to President Trump, state models project that more than half of the state could become infected with the novel coronavirus over the next two months. What does this projection mean in context?

Coronavirus testing has been plagued by confusion, delays and chaos, with the number of available, usable tests far outstripped by the need. The situation, health care providers and experts say, has impaired their ability to know how many people have the virus — but a significantly larger number, they suspect, than that confirmed by state and federal officials.